Rescue efforts deployed to Haiti after devastating earthquake

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The earthquake spared neither poor nor powerful. The president was homeless, the U.N. mission chief missing, the archbishop dead. Whole neighborhoods were flattened and perhaps tens of thousands of people killed in the latest catastrophe to befall impoverished Haiti.

Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/MCTA car is crushed by a fallen building in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Tuesday.
The first cargo planes with food, water, medical supplies, shelter and sniffer dogs headed to the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation a day after the magnitude-7 quake flattened much of the capital of 2 million people.

Tuesday’s earthquake brought down buildings great and small — from shacks in shantytowns to President Rene Preval’s gleaming white National Palace, where a dome tilted ominously above the manicured grounds.

Hospitals, schools and the main prison collapsed. The capital’s Roman Catholic archbishop was killed when his office and the main cathedral fell. The head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission and his deputy were missing in the ruins of the organization’s multiple-story headquarters.

Late today, the U.N. chief said 16 U.N. personnel were confirmed dead, with 100 to 150 U.N. workers still unaccounted for.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that 11 Brazilian peacekeepers and five international police officers — three from Jordan and one each from Chad and Argentina — were killed in the "horrendous" quake.

"Many continue to be trapped inside U.N. headquarters and other buildings," said Ban, noting that includes the U.N.’s mission chief, Hedi Annabi, and his chief deputy, Luis Carlos da Costa.

At a triage center improvised in a hotel parking lot, people with cuts, broken bones and crushed ribs moaned under tentlike covers fashioned from bloody sheets.

AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Darren CalabreseMilitary personnel prepare to load supplies on a CC-177 Globemaster on the tarmac at CFB Trenton, for a Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) humanitarian mission to earthquake ravaged Haiti today."I can’t take it anymore. My back hurts too much," said Alex Georges, 28, who was still waiting for treatment a day after the school he was in collapsed and killed 11 classmates. A body lay a few feet away.

"This is much worse than a hurricane," said doctors assistant Jimitre Coquillon. "There’s no water. There’s nothing. Thirsty people are going to die."

Bodies were everywhere in Port-au-Prince — those of tiny children adjacent to schools, women in the rubble-strewn streets with stunned expressions frozen on their faces, men hidden beneath plastic tarps and cotton sheets.

Haiti’s leaders struggled to comprehend the extent of the catastrophe — the worst earthquake to hit the country in 200 years — even as aftershocks still reverberated.

"It’s incredible," Preval told CNN. "A lot of houses destroyed, hospitals, schools, personal homes. A lot of people in the street dead. ... I’m still looking to understand the magnitude of the event and how to manage."

Preval said thousands of people were probably killed. Leading Sen. Youri Latortue told the Associated Press that 500,000 could be dead, but conceded that nobody really knows.

"Let’s say that it’s too early to give a number," Preval said.

In Petionville, next to the capital, people used sledgehammers and their bare hands to dig through a collapsed commercial center, tossing aside mattresses and office supplies. More than a dozen cars were entombed, including a U.N. truck.

Nearby, about 200 survivors, including many children, huddled in a theater parking lot using sheets to rig makeshift tents and shield themselves from the hot sun.

People streamed into the Haitian countryside, where wooden and cinderblock shacks showed little sign of damage. Many balanced suitcases and other belongings on their heads. Ambulances and U.N. trucks raced in the opposite direction, toward Port-au-Prince.

The capital’s ruined buildings fell on both the poor and the prominent: The body of Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot, 63, was found in the ruins of his office, according to the Rev. Pierre Le Beller at Miot’s order, the Saint Jacques Missionary Center in Landivisiau, France.

Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times/MCTMore than 150 patients await medical assistance near a makeshift hospital at the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, today. Senate President Kelly Bastien was among those trapped alive inside the Parliament building, and a day later had stopped responding to rescuers’ cries, Latortue said.

Even the main prison in the capital fell down, "and there are reports of escaped inmates," U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva.

Haiti’s quake refugees likely will face an increased risk of dengue fever, malaria and measles — problems that plagued the impoverished country before, said Kimberley Shoaf, associate director of the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters.

In related developments:

• President Obama promised an all-out rescue and humanitarian effort and American officials said they were responding with ships, helicopters, transport planes and a 2,000-member Marine unit, as well as civilian emergency teams from across the U.S.

"We have to be there for them in their hour of need," Obama said.

• The international Red Cross said a third of the country’s 9 million people may need emergency aid, a burden that would test any nation and a crushing catastrophe for impoverished Haiti.

• Looting began almost as quickly as the quake struck at 4:53 p.m. and people were seen carrying food from collapsed buildings. Many lugged what they could salvage and stacked it around them as they slept in streets and parks.

• Among the dozens forced to abandon a Tuesday evening flight to Miami was Kency Germain of Eatontown, N.J. He kept his family — five adults and three children including his wife — at the airport until nearly 3 a.m. They made their way to the U.S. Embassy, where they were allowed to sleep briefly near the entrance.

"It was safer in there (the airport) than it was out there in Port-au-Prince," Germain said.

• Conservative televangelist Rev. Pat Robertson blamed the earthquake on a "pact with the devil" purportedly entered into by the Haitian people in a bid to defeat French colonizers in the early 19th century.

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it," Robertson said on his Christian Broadcasting Network show. "They were under the heel of the French ... and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’

"True story. And the devil said, ‘Okay, it’s a deal,’" Robertson said. "Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another."

MCT News Service contributed to this report.

HAITI AT A GLANCE

History: The native Taino Amerindians — who inhabited the island of Hispaniola when it was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492 — were virtually annihilated by Spanish settlers within 25 years. In 1697, Spain ceded to the French the western third of Hispaniola island, which later became Haiti. The French colony, based on forestry and sugar-related industries, became one of the wealthiest in the Caribbean but only through a heavy importation of African slaves and great environmental degradation. In the late 18th century, Haiti’s nearly half-million slaves revolted. After a prolonged struggle, Haiti became the first black republic to declare independence in 1804. The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti has been plagued by political violence for most of its history. An armed rebellion led to the forced resignation and exile of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004

• Population: 9,035,536

• Ethnic groups: Black 95 percent, mulatto and white 5 percent

• Literacy rate: 52.9 percent (age 15 and over can read and write)

• Median age: 20.2 years

• Life expectancy: 60.8 years

• HIV/AIDS prevalence: 2.2 percent

• Size: 10,714 square miles (slightly smaller than Maryland)

• Terrain: Mostly rough and mountainous

• Natural hazard: Lies in the middle of a hurricane belt

• President: Rene Preval

• Economy: Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with 80 percent of the population living under the poverty line and 54 percent in abject poverty.
Unemployment rate: Greater than 67 percent